


the law of the wood

by roipecheur



Category: Daredevil (Comics), Daredevil (TV), The Company of Wolves - All Media Types
Genre: Father Lantom - Freeform, Foggy Nelson - Freeform, Karen Page - Freeform, M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-29
Updated: 2021-01-29
Packaged: 2021-03-15 20:07:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,061
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29070048
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/roipecheur/pseuds/roipecheur
Summary: A story of: the village, the wood, the path, and the wolves.The Company of WolvesAU that no one asked for, but you're getting anyway.
Relationships: Frank Castle/Matt Murdock, Frank Castle/Matt Murdock/Elektra Natchios
Comments: 6
Kudos: 18





	the law of the wood

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings for:  
> -Body horror  
> -Graphic violence (including during sex, but it's not sexual violence, see the end notes for spoilers if you need more details)  
> -Slight dubious consent, in the sense that it's enthusiastic but not necessarily well-informed  
> -Do you consider a partially-turned werewolf eating a human cannibalism? Then there's cannibalism.  
> -I'm rating this mature, but it's more mature bordering on explicit? Kinda? 
> 
> This is based on the movie / short story _The Company of Wolves_. You don't have to read it to understand what's going on here (the short story itself is pretty obviously based on Red Riding Hood with a side of sexual awakening), but I uploaded the PDF here if anyone wants to read it: https://cryptpad.fr/file/#/2/file/jCNnw38Piw71wCCm5RyufOSA/ --I cropped it from a longer PDF, so the story starts halfway down the first page. 
> 
> Thanks @ SpaceTimeConundrum for the beta!

High in the hills of the country, the woods spread thick like a quilt, like the encroaching waters of a rising sea, unbroken save for the islands of sparse villages and the dry ground of the highest steppes, where not even the goats dared to tread, and the thin capillaries of the forest-path. Around the path, trees leaned in and closed overhead in a thicket that made twilight of noontime, and reached out with the long fingers of their branches. The wary traveler knew not step so much as a single foot off the path; the forest devours, and leaves less than clean-picked bones behind.

The woods press close in midwinter, and the wolves howl from its edges, tempted by the scent of ruminating cattle and braying sheep, all their wild prey gone to sleep the winter through or find better meals on warmer slopes. On such nights, mothers would draw their children near and close the window curtains lest they see strange shapes pass across the moon, and would tell them stories of the forest and its dangers: wolves and witches, fair folk and the Devil himself.

Though the words may have been spoken better in midsummer, for it was midsummer when a woman of the village walked with a stranger in the woods, and he plied her with wine and promises and they spent many a fine night together at his strange camp. And one day, she went back to find only stirring dust in the place where his camp had been, and wept most bitterly, and her mother scolded her for a fool, and saw her married to another man before her belly swelled. When a daughter was born some seven months after the wedding, the man was sensible enough to say nothing save that her health was a blessing, given that she’d come so soon, and kind enough to raise the girl as his own. So they might have lived in happiness for all their days, but on midsummer’s night in the girl’s fifteenth year, her father came back. At the edge of the woods he waited, and called her a-howling, and she leapt out the window and was a wolf before her feet touched the ground. Some say she was never seen again, but some say her mother never had any more to fear of the woods, and would come back to her husband’s house with game that she had neither the skill nor tools to catch.

Another tale the mothers might tell spoke of generations past, when armies traveled through the woods and camped on the hills. Their soldiers spoke strange words, and they were as like to offer you a coin for some fare or a barn to sleep in as they were to take it by force. In such times, a man, desperate, sought out a witch of the woods for a means to increase his strength, and she sent him away with a potion and a smile, and told him to drink it naked under the next full moon. He did as she bade, and when the moon shone on his flesh and the potion burned in his belly, his bones shifted and his flesh cracked and he emerged as a great wolf the size of a bear, monstrous, huge. His growl shook the earth, and his panting breath could spin the windmills, and his paws killed many an invader with a single blow. In this way, he protected the villages of the country, but when the armies were gone, his appetite could not be sated, and he ate and ate until men’s ribs stuck out from their sides, and their wives’ cheekbones grew sharp as knives, and their children cried in their beds from hunger. Wasting though they were, the great wolf hungered still, and began to look at them with his glowing eyes as if he wished to suck marrow from their bones. Gathering up the last of their strength, the men of the country surrounded him with spear and sword, arrow and axe, and after a long and bloody battle, the wolf lay dead on the ground. A crabapple tree grows there now, but the blood of the wolf is in it, and none will eat the fruit.

The woods give, but not as much as they take.

Lastly, and not so long past, they say a she-wolf trotted in from the woods and walked through the streets of the village under a waxing half-moon, sniffing here and there like a stray dog, as bold as you please. One of the village men sent an iron-tipped arrow through the meat of her hindleg for fear of his chickens, and she ran off yelping into the night. And so he went to bed much contented, but woke an hour later to the sound of knocking on his door, and peered out his window to see a young woman, crying piteously with barely a shift to cover her, and she bled right through it from the wound in her thigh. She went from house to house and cried and cried, and knocked and knocked, but none would give her answer.

On the solstice, then, on the longest night of the year, children huddled around the fire and listened to the wolves howl, and learned the tales like the king’s law. Go into the woods only by day, only when you must, and do not stray from the forest-path, or the wolves will catch your scent and will never let up chasing you until their teeth crunch your bones. Keep your name from strangers in the woods, lest they be one of the fair folk and your life and soul become forfeit. Never accept a witch’s gift, never wear a wolfskin belt, and never strip naked under the moonlight, for that is how men become wolves. Beware the wolves’ sharp teeth, for they will rend and tear and send your soul up to heaven, but beware more the wolf that blunts his teeth to smile at you, who comes in disguise and wears his fur outside-in. He will bite you, too, but his is a soul-bite that will drag you with him, down to hell.

Men have many laws, but the wolves have only one.

*

It was neither swelling summer nor harsh midwinter, but a deep, gold autumn on the day the boy walked the narrow path between the fields, on his way from the church to his friend the butcher’s house. The boy, blind, carried a basket in one arm and his stout cane in the other, and used it to mark his path as he passed behind a hill and out of sight of the village. There three youths waited in hiding and watched his passing, but he could not see them, nor could he hear their footfalls in the rustle of the grass; rawboned and scrawny, they tracked the rabbit to its den and the quail to its nest for extra meat, and practiced the art of moving silently to evade ears far more sensitive than his. He did not know them until they were on him, hitting and taunting.

“Witch-child, witch child,” they sang, though he had a few years on them, and they were nearly grown themselves; his young face made the old jibe stick. They knocked the basket from his hand, and struck at him in a quick, darting fashion, and laughed when he spun about. The boy fought back with his cane, but there were three of them and one of him, and it was only a lucky blow that caught one, hard, in the ribs. In a rage, the youth seized the stout cane and knocked the boy about his head hard enough that he fell senseless to the ground and would not stir, no matter how they prodded him.

The youths looked from one to the other and thought of the priest and church on yonder hill, and began to feel afraid. Gathering close, they conspired to hide the evidence of their crime where none would find it. They stole his basket, and broke his cane for kindling, but left his red cloak, though they envied its softness. Red as poppies, red as blood on snow, his grandmother had knit it for him when she yet lived, a bright color so that he might be more easily found, should he ever become lost. None other like it could be found in the village, so the youths wrapped him in it, and carried him away.

The boy woke in the woods, and he woke alone.

Many a year had gone by since the boy walked along the forest-path, but he knew the woods, the green, loamy scent, absent of the stink of livestock; the birdcall uninterrupted by the chatter and clatter of the village folk. He felt about himself in the wet mud where they’d left him lying, and touched ginger fingers to the lump on his skull and bit back a whimper. Where lay the path, and where the village, and where deeper into the danger of the woods, he could not tell. He felt about and found a boulder to rest on, and pulled himself onto it, grateful to at least be out of the mud. His basket and cane were lost, but they had left him his cloak, though it stuck with mud, as they had done their best to ruin it. Hunched on the rock, he drew his cloak about himself and strained to hear any familiar voice a-calling. He dared not call first, for anything in the woods might hear him, and he wrapped his arms around his knees and quaked in fear.

 _Snap-snap!_ said twigs in the brush, and the boy started violently and forgot not to speak. “Who’s there?” he called out.

“Oh!” said a strange man’s voice. The boy heard the crunch of leaves beneath feet, and then the voice again, closer. “You, there! Who are you?”

“I—I cannot give my name, sir,” the boy replied. “It is unwise, to give one’s name to a stranger in the woods.”

“Hmph! Been listening to old wives’ tales, have you? Well then,” the stranger continued, without waiting for an answer. “Are you lost?”

“Yes,” the boy said after a moment, mindful of any truths he shared with a stranger, but that much, he could not hide. “I am lost, and would be much obliged if you might take me back to the village. Are you a traveling man? We don’t have much, but I can offer you a meal, and a warm place to sleep.”

The sound of footsteps came again, squelching in the mud, and the boy tilted his head this-way and that-way to hear from which direction the stranger approached. Then, just before him, the footsteps stopped. “I am no traveler, but a hunter,” said the hunter. “How did you think I killed these fowl?”

“I cannot see them, sir,” the boy said, for there was no hiding that, either. “I am quite blind.”

“What! Blind?” The hunter’s voice sounded from lower, as if he had stooped to peer in the boy’s face. “Well, so you are. You ought not to wander in the woods.”

Haughtily, the boy said, “I did not choose to come here!” He turned his head away, and unwittingly, brought his injury into the hunter’s sight.

“You’re hurt,” the hunter said softly, and soft fingers brushed against the knot on his skull. The boy flinched at the unexpected touch and so slipped off the rock and nearly into the mud again, but strong arms caught him and steadied him on his feet. “And filthy,” the hunter added with a chuckle, and for no reason he could say or tell, the boy blushed.

“You frightened me,” he said accusingly. “I can’t see when you’re about to touch me.”

“I am sorry,” the hunter said, so solemnly that the boy believed him. “Come, now, and I will take your arm and lead you. The hour grows late, and you would not do well to stay in the woods after dark.”

In the distance, a wolf howled. The boy gripped the hunter’s arm anxiously and allowed himself to be led. “You will take me back to the village?” he asked.

“No, it is too far. You must stay with me tonight,” the hunter said. “I have a cabin set up just a little father on.”

“They couldn’t have brought me _that_ far,” the boy thought aloud, and swallowed the cold trickle of fear in his throat. He took reassurance in the hunter’s shirt under his hand, coarse and ordinary, and the heat of his body bleeding throat it. The flesh of the fair folk, the boy knew, was as cold as the pond-ice in winter, and only a naked man might transform into a wolf.

“Brought? Who brought you?” the stranger asked.

The boy hesitated, but he could find no trick in the question, abrupt as it was, and no polite way of refusing to answer. “Some youths of the village.”

“Why would someone bring you into the woods, and leave you?”

“Because a calf was born with two heads,” the boy said, before he thought better of it. “They say my mother was a witch.”

A bird call rang out from a nearby tree, a forlorn song for the dying season. “Was she?” the hunter asked.

The question might have angered him had it come from another, but the hunter asked so simply, as if he were merely curious and cared nothing for what the answer would be, that the boy answered him in the same fashion. “I never met her. They say I appeared in my father’s house one day, when I was still a babe in arms, and he would never speak of my mother to a single soul. They say she must be a witch of the wood. But my father said she was a godly woman,” the boy told him. “Young men of the village attacked me on the path, and the next thing I knew, I was here. I am blamed, sometimes, when things go wrong.”

The hunter started to speak, but the mournful howl came again, closer, and another answered it. In fear, the boy froze, and his fingers dug near-bruising into the hunter’s arm.

“We are not in danger yet,” the hunter said, covering the boy’s hand with his own until the grip relaxed. “But the sun is setting, and we must step quickly. Don’t be afraid.”

Sooner might he have said not to breathe, the boy thought, and held back the hysterical laughter that bubbled in his chest like a pot too long over the fire, for he did not want the hunter to think him mad. Fear was his earliest and most constant companion, fear of the woods, fear of the wolves, fear that his father might not come home (until one day, he did not), fear of the village folk and their whispers, fear that had grown and grown and filled the place where his sight had once been. He might have sooner been free of his heartbeat.

The boy moved his foot where the hunter told him, and they began walking again. “I thank you kindly, sir,” he said.

“You needn’t call me sir,” the hunter said. “How old are you?”

“One-and-twenty,” the boy said.

The hunter had been a man at that age, with a wife and young child and a second increasing in his wife’s belly, though he did not get to keep them for long. In those days, in that country, children grew up fast, but the boy was a boy still. He had been raised by the priest since his father’s death, and kept very innocent.

“I’ve not reached thirty myself, and have neither land nor title,” the hunter told the boy as he helped him over a fallen log. “Don’t be so formal.”

“I’m sorry. Only, you haven’t told me your name,” the boy said, an invitation.

The hunter smiled, and might have given the boy something to fear anew, but his blindness hid from him the white sharpness of the hunter’s teeth. “I asked for yours first,” he reminded him.

And the boy opened his mouth, but fear held his tongue at the last instant, and he tripped over a branch in his distraction.

“Careful, Red,” the hunter told him, catching him once again, and again, the boy blushed at his clumsiness, and the warmth of the man who held him, very close.

“What did you call me?” he asked.

“Red hair, red cloak, where it hasn’t been soiled. I must call you something,” the hunter explained, and sounded quite reasonable. “Did you not know?”

“I was blinded when I was nine; I remember colors,” the boy told him irritably. The nickname made him feel strangely, as if he ate at a table lain with oddities and could not tell the host truly whether or not he liked the food. “I suppose—” he started to say, but the hunter hushed him.

“Quiet now, Red,” he bid him. “Unless you want the wolves to hear us.”

Knowledge is power, and knowledge of a name may grant power over the thing itself—so learned the children of the village from the fireside on the cold, long nights of winter. What the hunter called him was not his true name or his Christian one, but there was power in it all the same, and the boy felt its sway increase every time he responded. If he feared it, if he feared the hunter, he feared the wolves more. He let himself be led on in silence.

*

The cabin stood in a small clearing, sanctuary as a church to a weary vagrant, built sturdy with walls of thick logs. They reached it just as the night-insects began chirping and the evening breeze blew cool against the boy’s cheek. Both faded to dull muteness as the hunter shut the door tight against the elements, against the forest and its dangers, and the boy could have wept with relief.

Then the hunter spoke. “Here, sit in this chair. I must go to the well for water.”

Fear broke the boy’s surface like cracking ice. “Aren’t you scared of the wolves?”

So, the hunter let the boy feel the sculpted wood of his crossbow, and the shaft of the arrow, and how he set it up on the table facing the door, so one might shoot whatever comes through with the slightest touch. “No wolf would dare cross me in my own yard,” he said. “I have tracked their pawprints through the darkest woods, and I have their pelts laying out as rugs by the fire. The wolves fear _me.”_

Saying this, he went to fetch water, and even left the boy the crossbow as proof. Once, twice, three times he came and went, and emptied his pail into what sounded like a basin, sloshing as it slowly filled. Nerves ran through the boy like ants in an ant-hill in the space between the hunter’s hand on the door, and his voice announcing, playfully, that it was only him, and the next time, the boy sprung up from the table and walked forward until he hit the wall. He felt across the rough logs, thinking that knowing the length and breadth of the cabin might comfort him, and found his fingers reading the knots in them like the priest read his bible. He knew them, and when he crossed over to the fireplace—there, yes! The stone on the corner, broken like a face, with holes for its eyes and mouth.

When the hunter returned the last time, the boy had news for him. “This was my grandmother’s own house,” he said. “I recognize the wood-knots in the walls, and the stone of the fireplace. She has been dead some five years, now, and no one wanted to live so far out in the woods. However did you come here?”

“Your grandmother’s!” the hunter repeated, surprised. “I came across this place by chance in early spring, when snow still lay on the ground. The door was off its hinges, and squirrels had moved into the chimney, so I thought it quite abandoned. I meant no disrespect.”

“I am glad to see it used again. It would have only gone back to the woods,” the boy said, and he was glad, too, to know where he was, and that the village lay but two hours’ walk along the forest-path. He would be home before the church bells tolled noon, he thought, and felt almost safe.

The hunter walked over the fireplace and knelt next to the boy, to kindle a flame in the hearth. “How did she die?” he asked.

“In her bed. She was very old,” the boy told him, and left out that in her delirium, at the very end, she’d cried out that wolves were eating her.

“That is a blessing,” the hunter said, and stood as the fire sparked to life. He took the boy to one of the water-pails to wash his hands, and then set him to work plucking a goose he’d caught for supper, meanwhile heating some of the water he’d brought in over the growing flames.

Presently, the goose was plucked, and the water was near-boiling, and the hunter added it into some of the cooler water in the basin so it would neither burn nor freeze the flesh. “Come, have a bath,” the hunter said, and pulled the boy up by his wrist from the table.

“What?” the boy asked dumbly, but felt the dried mud pull at the skin of his face as he did, and then felt his stomach squirm in humiliation at his rudeness, flaking dirt like a shedding dog all over his grandmother’s house, that the hunter had worked so hard to repair.

Off came the boy’s cloak, and then his shirt from over his head at the hunter’s insistence. “A poor host I would be, to bring you back to your wife looking like a bog-witch,” he said.

“My _what?”_ the boy asked, and stepped quickly out of his trousers, and into the tub to so that in this way he might gain a little distance from the hunter. “I’m not married.”

“One-and-twenty and not married? What are you waiting for?” the hunter asked. He pressed soap into the boy’s hand, and the boy accepted it, and began scrubbing his skin hard enough to feel it smarting.

Cupping water in his hands, the boy splashed it over his face. “I wish you wouldn’t make fun of me,” he said.

“Why do you think I’m making fun of you?” the hunter asked.

“No woman would marry me,” the boy replied, as he had told himself so many times, hopeless, agonized, lonely. “You must know I am quite useless.”

“Who has told you that you’re useless?” The hunter bristled, as if he took personal offence and meant to correct the insult. “Besides, you don’t have to be useful to marry. A rich widow on her husband’s land, with her husband’s household left to her, might marry you for your fine face, and keep you well, and never worry that a younger woman would catch your eye.”

No one had spoken like this to the boy before, and he shrunk down into the bath in bewilderment, his mind running in circles like the herding dogs after sheep. Rumors of his witch-mother scared off half the village girls, and the warning glare of the priest scared the rest, and the few men whose questing eyes fell on the boy during the Sunday service. In the dozen years since his blindness, he’d known little and thought less of his own appearance.

“I think you’re still making fun of me,” the boy said, and turned his back to where he thought the hunter was, and hung his leg over the side of the bath to wash it.

“Perhaps I am, but only as a friend might,” the hunter said. “Do your friends never tease you?”

The boy thought of his friend the butcher, and the basket he’d carried earlier that day, a gift of sweetcakes and honey. He’d known the butcher since they were boys together, and he alone treated the boy the same through all his misfortunes, the same laughing manner, the same arm thrown around his shoulders, so he almost didn’t notice the times when it ceased to be camaraderie and became a way to guide him. And the butcher made fun sometimes, yes, in the way that friends do, but had never made him feel so strangely.

“Not like that,” the boy said stiffly.

Behind him, he could hear the hunter moving about, setting things on the table, and then he heard the hissing of water in a pot, and smelled meat cooking. “I wasn’t lying about your face,” the hunter said. “Surely some girl must have caught your ear.”

And the boy thought again of his friend the butcher, and of the butcher’s pretty wife—or so everyone agreed she was pretty. Pretty enough, if you believed the gossips, to attract the hand of a lord’s son who lived many miles through the woods, in a town larger than any in the village had ever seen, and to lose it again just as quickly when she caused her own brother’s death. How, no one could say, and the boy would have doubted it had he not heard her through the closed doors of confessional, crying to the priest. But she laughed like bells and birdsong, and she kissed the top of his head like a child when he sat at their table, and she and the butcher seemed happy together, though God had not yet blessed them with children. The boy always felt very warm in their kitchen, and sorry when it was time to leave.

All of this he kept to himself, and was grateful he could hear the hunter still at his back, so he could not see the boy’s face. “The father says that if I work and study hard and can remember my verses, I might become priest after he has passed,” the boy said. “Priests cannot marry.”

The hunter chuckled, and the boy turned in the bath. “Is that funny?” he asked sharply.

“No, no,” the hunter said, recovering. “Just that I, too, wanted to go into the church.”

“Oh!” the boy said, and frowned. “Why didn’t you?”

“I was called to the king’s service. The war,” the hunter explained. “Three years, I was gone.”

Though he was finished washing, the boy suddenly felt very conscious of his nudity, and stayed in the tub to hide it while they spoke. “You could have gone into the church when you returned,” he said.

“War changes the way you see things,” the hunter told him, and then, to turn the conversation from himself, “Your father must be proud.”

“I like to think he would be,” the boy said.

The sounds of the hunter’s movements stilled, leaving only the simmering pot and crackling fire. “Is he with God?”

“With God or the Devil, it depends on who you ask,” the boy said, and knew he was telling overmuch to a stranger, but the heat of the bath and the familiarity of his grandmother’s old cabin loosened his tongue. “He fought in the tournaments, and when he wished to fight no longer, he was in too much debt to quit. So, he went to the edge of the woods, and met a witch, and made a bargain. He bargained . . . poorly,” the boy went on after a delicate pause, against the old pain that he could still feel fresh. “In the end, he lost my sight, and then his life when he tried to get it back. The priest took me in, after.”

“The woods take from us all,” the hunter said.

But he said the old adage like it was more to him, and the boy asked, “What did they take from you?”

“My wife and children,” the hunter told him, and it was as if they traded in the market, answer for answer, story for story. “The wolves came and took them, and left scarcely enough to bury.”

Wisely, the boy bowed his head. “The woods take from us all.”

The water grew cold, and the boy could delay no longer, so he stepped out of the bath and wrapped himself in the soft blanket the hunter offered as a way to keep warm and dry. He spoke no word of the hunter’s arms or teeth, as he could not see their size, nor of his eyes, for he could not see how they watched him, and glowed in the firelight. Stern as he was, the old priest in the village loved the boy as a son, and had often moved his spoon around his plate on lean winter nights long after it was empty, so the boy would not know that the priest went hungry while he ate his fill. So he had grown well, with a fine form to match his face. 

“Red,” the hunter called him, and he was red, from his hair to his skin, flushed with the heat of the bath, to the soft, red blanket made of the same stuff as his cloak—to the hunter’s glowing eyes, as red as a slab of meat. “Come sit at the table.” He took the boy’s arm to lead him, and this time the boy did not flinch. “It will be ready, soon, and you must be starving.”

*

At the hunter’s table, they ate goose meat—common fare in this season, as the birds travelled south—and hard bread, and the last of the bitter, leafy vegetables of the year, salvaged from the remains of the grandmother’s garden. The boy discovered he was famished, having not eaten since he broke his fast that morning, and bit down overeager into a piece of meat, sending a rivulet of bloody grease down his chin. He self-consciously reached for a corner of his blanket, but the hunter seized his jaw at once and licked it off.

The boy started so suddenly he nearly fell from the bench where he sat. “Did you just lick me?” he asked, though touching fingertips to his face, he could feel the cooling saliva.

“You just bathed. It wouldn’t do to get dirty again,” the hunter said. “Did I startle you?”

“I—you—” The boy bit off a piece of bread and chewed it furiously before he remembered to soften it with well-water. “Is that something your people do, where you’re from?”

“It . . . is something my kind does, yes,” the hunter replied, and tore into his food so noisily that it stopped the boy from further inquiry.

He went on eating with greater care, with small, delicate bites as the goats might nibble only the safe parts of the bramble-bushes and come away miraculously uncut by thorns. Soon, he felt full, and almost tired, though he doubted very much that he’d be able to sleep well in a stranger’s house with the woods all around.

The hunter finished his meal, and smacked his lips in satisfaction. “Well, Red. Have you eaten enough?”

“Yes,” the boy said. “Thank you.”

“A poor host I would be, if I didn’t feed you,” the hunter said. “Come sit by the fire, then. The night grows cold.”

So the boy rested by the fire on one of the wolfskin rugs, marveling to himself as he touched the pelt, that he had never known a wolf’s fur could be so soft. Around him, the hunter cleared the table, and set the boy’s dirty clothes in a pail to soak, and bathed briskly in the now-cold bath—“No use wasting the water, after I carried it in,” he said, and sang a song under his breath that the boy almost knew, and dumped the water outside when he’d gotten his full use of it. 

Then, he joined the boy near the fire, and brought with him a bottle of grain-liquor “to warm the blood”, and it did indeed go down the boy’s throat and into his stomach like burning, and made him cough. “Slowly,” the hunter said, and helped him sip, and soon the boy did feel a pleasant warmth spread throughout his limbs, the brew much stronger than the watered-down beer he and the priest had with meals.

“You might take the bed, if you’re tired,” the hunter said, as he saw the boy yawn.

“I am not so tired yet,” the boy lied. He found he liked the hunter’s company, and didn’t want the night to end. “Would you tell me something of your travels? I have lived my whole life in the village, and we do not often get strangers passing through.”

The hunter obliged, and began to weave a tale of war: days and nights spent marching over strange lands, the bright, clashing chaos of battle, the moans of the dying and the stench of the dead. He told the boy of places where the sun shone hot enough to kill you with heat, where it never snowed, where the land lay flat and stretched to the horizon in dry, loose soil that the wind sometimes stirred up to choke you. In his travels he had even seen the ocean, and when he saw the boy’s fascination, attempted to put it into words. With his hand in the boy’s, he tried to convey the back-and-forth motion of the sailing ships, and spoke of the briny salt-smell, and the cries of the birds that only lived near the sea, and the shadowy shapes of creatures that swam near the surface of the water.

“And what of your village?” the hunter asked, when he had tired of his own story.

“There is not much to tell,” the boy said, and so told him in plain terms of the village and his life there, the narrow, mud-packed streets with the church forming its center, the rotation of the fields and the turn of the seasons, a place where any change smoothed out and disappeared at the next cycle, like a wrinkle in bedsheets, until no one could see a change had come at all. “When you take me back tomorrow, I hope you might stay awhile,” the boy finished shyly. “I daresay the village folk would pay you in food and ale to hear of your travels, and I must find some way to repay you, for saving me from the woods.”

The fire crackled with the collapse of log, and the hunter hummed in his throat as if considering this offer. “You might repay me now,” he said.

“How?” the boy asked, wondering if it were some kind of joke; he had nothing save his clothes, and he could not return to the village without them.

“With a kiss,” said the hunter.

The boy laughed. “A kiss! What would you want a kiss for?”

“Hasn’t anyone ever kissed you?” the hunter asked, and the back of his hand just touched the boy’s, where it lay outside of the folds of the blanket.

At his words, the boy remembered: the band of travelers that had passed through the village many years ago, before his sight left him, travelers who spoke and looked unlike anyone the boy knew and hailed from a land so distant that it defied his imagination. He remembered the girl his own age, her dark hair and flashing eyes so piercing in their anger that he feared she would curse him with a glance, like the fairy-queen who lived beneath the hill. But his fascination outweighed his fear, and so he’d peeked out from behind a tree to watch her drag a stick in the dirt behind the barn where her people slept, and she’d spun to him suddenly and demanded to know why he was staring.

 _Because you are very beautiful,_ the boy had said, and this had pleased her well, and she had darted over and kissed his cheek with a touch as light as a leaf drifting down from a tree. Then, while he’d stood open-mouthed as a fish and twice as dumb, she’d covered her mouth against a giggle, and ran back into the barn as fast as the hawk dives.

The girl and her people had left later that day, despite the warnings of the village folk, and the wolf-prints a shepherd had found outside his flock’s enclosure, and the howling they had all heard, carrying across the hills at night. It was a hard day’s walk to the next village if one left early in the morning, but the strange travelers insisted they could not delay, and so departed amidst the dark murmurs of the village folk, with the sun burning low in the afternoon sky. The girl had turned from her seat on the back of a wagon and met the boy’s eyes just before the woods closed around her like a trap springing shut. Later, in the safety of daylight and numbers and the sharpness of axes and pitchforks and other farm tools made weapons, some men of the village walked the path and found only the scrap of a torn cloak, its edges ragged and bloody. For many nights, the boy was plagued with nightmares, and woke up crying, and his father could not console him.

“Once,” the boy told the hunter quietly, his memory rolling over old terror and grief like a farmer tills his soil. He raised fingertips to his cheek where, if he tried, he could still feel her kiss burning, and said, “Here.”

“Only once?” the hunter asked.

The boy swallowed, and pulled the blanket around him more tightly. “There was a girl with a band of travelers. They left. We think”—he shuddered, and held back his fear—“we think the wolves got them.”

Slowly, the hunter’s hand moved from the boy’s up his arm, to smooth back his hair, and stay resting on the back of his neck. “You needn’t fear the wolves here,” he said like a promise.

“You must be afraid sometimes,” the boy said, and wondered if he felt afraid himself, and if not, why the hunter’s hand on the back of his neck made his heart beat so.

“I fear neither God nor the Devil nor the wolves of the woods,” the hunter told him. “You are safe with me.”

Uneasiness fluttered like a bird in the boy’s stomach, but the hunter’s hand drew him closer and he found he didn’t want to move away. “You should fear God and the Devil, at least.”

“Why should I?” the hunter asked.

“Otherwise, you might go to hell,” the boy told him earnestly, the lesson well-drummed from his years with the village priest.

The hunter huffed out a laugh, and the boy felt the warmth of it against his cheek, and smelled the blood of the goose on the hunter’s breath, and blushed. “If I don’t fear the Devil, why should I fear hell?” he asked.

This went beyond the boy’s religious education; he thought the Bible a history and the priest’s sermons the word of God, and to the village folk, God and the Devil were as real as the sky and the harvest and the woods all around. So he’d learned the reward in memory and repetition, and the threat of punishment the few times he’d dared argue: the priest’s arm pulling him to the side, the fierce whisper of what the village folk might do if the supposed witch’s child questioned God. The boy opened and shut his mouth several times, but could not make himself speak.

“Never mind,” the hunter said in a murmur, his thumb rubbing the base of the boy’s skull. “I see I have upset you.”

“It’s—I don’t mind,” the boy said absently, the question already half-forgotten. He hadn’t been touched with such gentle affection since his father’s death, and leaned into the hunter’s hand like an old dog curls its old bones towards the fireplace in winter, and so exposed his throat as he did. The vein there beat in the firelight, and the hunter had to lick back the drool that wet his lips.

“So, Red,” the hunter asked, very near, his voice little more than a whisper. “Might I have that kiss?”

The old priest in the village had warned the boy against the touch of women, but had told him nothing of men, believing such rare things better left unspoken, and that his ignorance would keep him safe. And the boy knew the verse, knew man-shall-not-lie-with-man, but knew not rightly what it meant, and thought perhaps, the hunter wanted a kiss the way his father had kissed him goodnight when he was very small, and still needed to be carried to bed, though his body wished for more with a vague desire that would not manifest into anything distinct.

“Alright,” the boy said, and went stiff in surprise as he felt something against his mouth.

It was the hunter’s lips on his own, soft and warm—and wet, as the hunter’s tongue came out and teased the boy’s lips open, and then slipped into this mouth when he gasped. A shiver passed through the boy’s body like a hunger, though the dinner yet left him full, and he reached for the hunter as he tried to mimic what he was doing with his mouth, and knew he did something right when the hunter moaned with a rumble like thunder in his chest, and kissed the boy harder, as if he meant to devour him from the inside out.

The boy’s hands settled on the hunter’s face, and he pulled back a little, with mere inches between them. “Wait,” he said, when the hunter pressed forward to kiss him again.

“What’s wrong?” the hunter asked, and the boy felt his brow wrinkle beneath his fingers.

“Nothing.” The boy smiled. “I just want to know what you look like.”

And so the hunter kept still, and the boy’s hands passed over his forehead and nose, his closed eyes and cheekbones, his mouth wet from their kissing, the line of his jaw. One eye lay a hair lower than the other, and the boy thought sadly that the hunter must have been hurt in the war, and began to run his fingers behind the hunter’s neck and over his skull to see if he could discover the injury. He found it in the hunter’s short-cropped hair, and tilted his head to the side the way he did to hear better, as if that could help him better understand what he was feeling. Puckered indents lined up near matching on either side of his skull, and when the boy fit the tips of his fingers into them, his blood ran cold. His whole life in a mountain village, he knew the mark a dog’s bite leaves, as he knew that no dog had the size or strength to bite through a man’s skull until it cracked open like an egg, and knew, also, that no man could survive a bite like that and remain a man.

His breath came fast and shallow, and the hunter saw his fear and took his wrists and pulled the boy’s hands away from his head, and kissed his knuckles softly. “The woods take from us all.”

Trembling, the boy let his hand fall to the hunter’s shoulder, skimmed it down his ribs to his hips, and realized that he had never heard the hunter dress after his bath, and cursed himself—stupid, stupid! How stupid, to trust a stranger he met in the woods! But how little choice he’d had, in trusting him, in the village youths attacking him, in his blindness, in any of it! Anger leant him strength, and the boy tore away from the hunter and ran for the door like he meant to run out into the night barefoot, with only the blanket to cover him.

But the hunter got there first, pressed his back to the door and laughed so the boy would know where he was and that he could not so easily escape, but the boy had counted on this, and on the hunter backing him towards the table where his crossbow lay. At the last second, the boy turned and touched the spot where the hunter had shown him, and felt the bolt speed past him as it tore through the air, heard the hunter’s cry as the arrow found its mark.

The boy stepped carefully away and listened for the hunter’s breath, for any sound of movement. His body still shook, as if with cold, but he only needed to survive until morning. Then, the forest-path would be safe, or safe as it could be, and he remembered where lay its entrance relative to his grandmother’s house. He would only need follow it back to the village. Feeling for the crossbow again, his hand hit the quiver of arrows that he would use to defend himself in the case the hunter was not so poorly injured and planned to eat him yet, and then his hands stilled as he heard something he had not predicted: a dog’s whine.

Suspiciously as the village folk might treat him, the dogs neither knew nor cared about his blindness or rumors of his witch-mother, and often bumped into his hands for pets and scratches, and thumped their tails against his legs in joy. Some of the smarter herding-dogs even knew to take him back to the church when he asked, and so the boy had always felt kindly towards them.

He touched his way along the side of the table and knelt past the side closest to the door, and reached out until he touched the fur of the wolf’s side, his great breaths heaving. Then the wolf moved, and the boy jerked his hand back in fear, but felt only the wolf’s tongue lap at it once, gently, before laying his head back down with a whimper, as if even that small motion had hurt.

“I am sorry,” the boy said, thinking that the hunter, the wolf, could have snapped his hand off if he wanted, and had chosen undeserved gentleness instead. “I didn’t know wolves could cry.”

The cabin was only one room, with shelves and cabinets for storage to one side, and a bed in the opposite corner, and the boy knew where his grandmother had kept her herbs. He found the hunter’s in much the same place, and identified the ones he wanted by smell. So he removed the arrow from the wolf’s side, and washed the wound as best he could, and covered it in herbs and torn bedding for a bandage. When he’d finished, he helped the wolf, limping, back to the fireside and sat down once more on the wolfskin rug.

There, the boy pet the wolf’s head and discovered the puckered, tooth-mark scars remained in either form. He intended to keep vigil until he heard the birds outside sing in the morning, but exhaustion fell on him as heavy as a blanket of winter snow, and he soon sank down onto the wolfskin and slept.

*

Late in the night, in the witching hour, the boy woke to the crack of logs still burning on the well-stoked fire, and a warm weight pressed against his back. Groping behind him, the boy felt bare flesh and not fur, and sat up quickly in alarm as he remembered the stories of wolves that transformed back into men after death. He touched the hunter’s side, and in his new form, the tight-wrapped bandage had come loose and slipped under the boy’s hand. The skin beneath felt whole and unblemished.

“How strange,” the boy murmured, beginning to wonder if he’d dreamed the whole thing.

“Not so strange,” the hunter said, and the boy jumped, for he had not known he was awake. “I heal fast, and faster as a wolf than a man.”

“Oh!” the boy said, and drew back in shame. “I’m sorry I shot you.”

The hunter took his hand and pulled him close again until they lay beside each other, face-to-face. “I’m sorry I frightened you,” the hunter said, and kissed him with a smile the boy could feel. “That was a good trick, Red. I think you might have served with me in the army.”

Laughing and emboldened, the boy kissed him because he liked the strange way it made him feel, and didn’t protest when the hunter lifted the end of his blanket and joined him beneath it. Their bodies pressed together, the hunter kissed him deep and languid like a wolf lazily snacking on his kill, nipped at his jaw and kissed the beating vein in his neck so the boy shivered.

“Are you still going to eat me?” he asked.

“What else am I to do with you?” the hunter asked like a joke, and bit a little where the boy’s neck met his shoulder, but not enough to hurt.

The boy ran his fingers through the hunter’s short hair, over the scars marking his skull. “What would you like to do?”

In response, the hunter dipped his head to kiss the boy’s chest, touched his stomach so lightly it almost tickled, and then lower still, and took the boy in his hand. Until now, the boy hadn’t noticed the evidence of his own arousal, and pulled back so quickly he tore himself loose of the blanket and came to rest on the far side of the fireplace, knees drawn up and stammering apologies.

The hunter sat, too, but stayed where he was. “What are you sorry for?” he asked.

“The priest says—” the boy began, but a hot humiliation burned in him, and he could not go further, or say exactly why. What the priest had said, well-meaning and himself believing every word, was that while the boy’s soul belonged to God, his body belonged to the Devil, and what lay between his legs most of all. Many a time the boy had felt the quiet stirring in him like a strange hunger, but even when he was alone, he feared he might not truly be, or that the priest might at any moment rise from his bed across the room they shared at night, or find him in a quiet corner, and condemn his soul to hell, and that fear had always stayed his hand.

Though he said none of this aloud, the hunter saw his fear and knew its source, and pushed his fury at the priest aside so that he might speak to the boy gently. “I will stop, if you like,” he said. “But it is just us here, and we aren’t hurting anyone.”

Away from the blanket and fire, the boy’s skin prickled cold in the night air, and he felt his way back to the hunter’s side. “I don’t think I—” he said, and then, more strongly, “I don’t think I want to stop.”

And he felt the hunter’s hand on the side of his neck, and the soft press of the hunter’s mouth on his. “If you ever do, you only need say so,” he told him, but the boy didn’t think he would. He wanted to tell the hunter his name and ask for his, and might have if his mouth hadn’t been kept so busy, wanted to take him back to the village or perhaps stay with him here, in a house he might have inherited had his life gone a bit differently. Most of all, he wanted to know what the hunter would do with him next with his mouth and with his hands, but then the hunter went still, and then the boy heard what he did before he could ask why—a scratching at the door, and then the sound of the latch raising.

The boy’s fear washed over him anew, and he clung to the hunter, who only kissed his head and stood, putting his body between the boy and the intruder. “She-wolf,” he said. “You have rights to much, but you know not to enter another’s den.”

“Huntsman,” a woman’s voice said, and the boy cowered in his blanket, both in fear and mortification at his own nudity. But even after many years, he recognized her strange accent, and knew who she was. “You have rights to little, and even less to that one, when I was first to catch his scent.”

So saying, she plucked the hunter’s cloak off the back of a chair and clothed herself in it, though it was the chill of flesh without fur and not her nakedness that guided her hand, for she had been a wolf too long to care for such things. Indeed, the hunter stood before her bare, and she did not so much as blink.

“If you caught his scent, it was when you were human, and in the village. Either alone would not let you claim rights,” the hunter said. “I found him well before you, and it has taken you many hours to catch up with me. You know you have no rights here.”

“I would fight you for him,” the she-wolf said. She smelled the blood soaked into the wooden planks of the floor, and knew the hunter was weakened.

The hunter knew this, too, and bared his teeth. “And if I don’t agree to fight?”

“Do you think I would give you the choice?” she asked.

“There is always a choice. I could call a council,” the hunter suggested, his voice mild, but with a hard current underneath.

“You wouldn’t,” said the she-wolf, though sounded as if this was something she doubted. “You have spit in the eye of many a wolf and man, and you have much to lose if they see you weak.”

“You have more to lose, if they see you disrespect another’s claim,” the hunter replied. “I have heard of you. I know your pack has only recently called you leader, and would soon elect another.”

The she-wolf scoffed, and stepped closer, so the boy heard the tread of her feet on the floor and shrank further, as if he wished he could disappear. “Do not forget, I have been a wolf much longer than you,” she said. “What do you know of the law?”

“I know the law,” the hunter said, and crouched down to rest his hand on the boy’s back, to comfort him. “I know the law of the wolves, the law of the wood, which is the law of the hunt. And I know the law of the path, of the edge of the wood, of boundaries. I know we may not hunt in the village, or men will be within their rights to hunt us in the wood, and that if men hunt us in the wood unprovoked, we might take them from the path. So, we leave alone their flocks and cattle, unless the winter is very lean and any move becomes one to postpone death, and they do not burn the trees to drive us out, or kill enough game to starve us. We are not in the village, now, or in the wood, but in an in-between place, a place of bargaining.” The hunter settled back on his haunches and said, “So, she-wolf. Bargain.”

A growl gathered in her throat, but she knew the truth in his words, and so sat across from him, greedy eyes sneaking now and again a look at the boy. “I would offer you free passage through our lands,” she said.

“I prefer to travel as a man, and the path is faster through the woods,” the hunter said. “I do not need passage.”

“Hunting rights then, as well,” the she-wolf offered. “To sustain yourself only, and to be renegotiated in lean times.”

“As a man, I might also hunt near other men, and bring my meat home for keeping,” the hunter answered. “I do not need that, either.”

Before her next offer, the she-wolf folded her arms and thought. “I would offer you your own territory, from the mossy creek to the bolder that looks like a man sitting down, from the wind-bent tree to the fairy-stones, through which even we do not pass.”

“I do not desire my own territory,” said the hunter. “Others would want it, and make it more trouble than it’s worth, to keep it.”

Frustrated, the she-wolf tapped her sharp nails staccato on the floor, a sound like the rain hitting thatched roofs in springtime. “What is it you want, then?”

“I enjoy how he smells,” the hunter said. “I enjoy so few things these days that I am loathe to give one up, now that I’ve found it.”

“When you call up a council, be sure to tell them you refuse to bargain in good faith,” the she-wolf snapped as she would at the fleeing tail of a rabbit.

But the hunter held a hand up to stop her from speaking further, or from leaving. “When there is enough meat to go around, even the most solitary hunters prefer to share, rather than expend energy by fighting.”

“A hard bargain!” the she-wolf exclaimed, and covered her mouth with her hand, and giggled much in the way the boy remembered. “You would ask to share in all I have?”

“I do not care to rule,” the hunter said diffidently. “And you do well enough. You do not, for instance, lure young girls off the path to turn them into werewolves, and slaughter their people when they try to follow.”

“And I do not, for instance, send my pack to murder women and children in their own garden,” the she-wolf replied pointedly. “Thank you for your approval.”

A swipe of her paw would have cut him less and been less cruel, but the hunter knew he had started the exchange, and thought better of retaliating in kind. “I am no vassal, but I would serve you when you needed, as long as our interests align,” the hunter said. “That is no small offer. They say you killed your maker.”

“They say you killed yours,” the she-wolf said. “And if I refuse your offer?”

“You can always leave,” the hunter told her. “The claim is mine, and you are far too late.”

The she-wolf hissed through her teeth. “Why is he worth so much to you, anyway?”

“He was the first to show me kindness,” the hunter said. “What is he to _you?”_

“He was the last to show me kindness,” the she-wolf answered in an echo, and in this way, she and the hunter saw each other clearly, and their animosity left them. So, in easier tones, she said, “You keep saying the claim is yours. Why, then, have you not done it?”

“I would have him willing,” the hunter said. “He stinks of fear.”

Her hackles raised again, and the she-wolf asked, “You enjoy the smell of his fear?”

“No." The hunter shook his head. “I would like to know how he smells when he is not afraid. A man relies on his eyes and the care of others. He has neither. A wolf has his nose and ears to help him.”

“And if it doesn’t turn out the way you hope, how will you keep him safe?” the she-wolf asked.

And the hunter looked back at her steadily with his glowing eyes, and asked, “How will _you?”_

“Hmph,” the she-wolf said. “Ask him, then.”

“His scent is in the woods, now. There is no helping that,” the hunter said. “If it were not us, it would be another, who might make a meal of his flesh and crunch the marrow of his bones for dessert. What is there to ask?”

“I smelled three others. We might yet trade,” the she-wolf replied.

So, the hunter turned to the boy, who had listened this whole time in fearful silence. “What say you, Red?” he asked. “We can take you back to your village, and would be within our rights to track and kill the ones who hurt you. Or, you can stay with us.”

“Stay with you?” the boy croaked, his voice like a rusty hinge.

“It would be like a marriage,” said the she-wolf, the strange girl he had once known for a moment, the one who the woods had taken.

The boy hunched over in thought. He thought of the village and the village folk, of how they’d talk if he returned from the woods after a day and night unscathed, if he returned only for wolves to come for the three youths that had seized him and left him in the woods to die. In his heart of hearts, he knew the truth; this would not save him. Many would see it as a sign of his power, and think him a witch, and not even the old priest could keep him from the noose.

Do not go into the woods, the old tales said, for once in the woods, you must follow their law. Even the priest said so. The priest would also tell the boy that it was better to lose his life than his soul, but here in his dead grandmother’s cabin, in the company of wolves and the deep, dark trees, it was his life that felt closer, and dearer.

“I don’t want to be afraid anymore,” the boy said, and sat up straight to show that he was certain, and let the blanket slip off his shoulders and fall to the wolfskin beneath.

They fell on him as if they worked together to bring down a kill. Between them the boy lay, on the skins of wolves slain in the hunter’s revenge. The she-wolf held his face in her sharp-nailed hands and kissed him until he could barely breathe, and the hunter lay at his back, his mouth hot against the back of the boy’s neck, and when the she-wolf finally let him up for air, the boy turned his head to kiss him. With a bite to his lips, the hunter pulled away and stood, but the she-wolf took the boy’s hands before he could question the hunter’s leaving. She made the boy learn her body, and he ran his fingers over her face, and cupped her breasts in his hands, and then she guided his hand lower, past the puckered bite-mark on her ribs and the other scar on her thigh, and at last between her legs.

“Oh, you are very different,” the boy said, but liked what his hands felt, and the laugh of the she-wolf as she moved against him.

The hunter returned with a vial of oil from the kitchen, as the boy discovered when oiled fingers touched him in a way that felt very odd, but the she-wolf kissed the question right out of his mouth and for long enough that he pushed back against the hunter’s fingers and forgot he wanted to ask anything at all. He still didn’t understand the way they touched him, but they asked him and he said yes, and they asked him a second time and he said yes, and they asked him a third time, and he did not say yes, but he did say, _please._

So they surrounded and consumed him, like they had decided to eat him after all, and had divided his flesh and swallowed it down in morsels. The boy could not move or think, but he wanted only to feel, and he did, and his pleasure grew until it crested. At the height of it, when he cried out and his body went stiff and the she-wolf felt him spill inside her, they took him. Each trying to outdo the other, they dug their long teeth into his shoulders, splitting skin and muscle and bone, sending blood down the boy’s body so he was cloaked again in red. It hurt; of course it hurt, as some things in life always must. He wanted to scream, but the blood flowing into his throat made it a gurgle. As one, the she-wolf and the hunter pulled away as soldiers retrieve swords from the bodies of their slain enemies, and the boy collapsed between them as if dead.

*

He woke to the smell of blood, and knew somehow that less than an hour had passed. First, he realized the blood was his own, soaked into the wolfskin beneath him, and second that he was unhurt. Reaching up, he felt the new scars like a necklace around his chest and throat, like a wedding band, and so smiled like a newlywed. Third, he realized he lay now between two wolves instead of a man and a woman, their great backs pressed against him to keep him warm.

As if in a trance, the boy stood, and the wolves stood with him, so large that he needed to bend his arms at the elbows to rest his hands on their shoulders. His skin felt liquid, shifting, and they guided him out of the cabin’s door and into the clearing beyond.

The moon bathed the woods in its pale light, a shade of the sun as spirits are shades of the living. In his blindness, the boy had forgotten the light of the moon, and sighed now to feel it on his skin. And he knew, suddenly, the exact dimensions of the tree before him, and the mouse that ran beneath its roots and the insects that sang in its branches. He could hear the beating hearts and the contracting, expanding lungs of the wolves at his side, hear the creek miles distant, smell every creature that had walked through the clearing for days and days, taste the path each had taken on the air. Triumphantly, joyously, the boy laughed.

“I can see!” he exclaimed, though his eyes remained dark; he knew more of his surroundings than sight had ever told him. “I can see _everything_ —oh!”

The last was a cry of surprise, and then of twisting pain as the change took him. No drowning blood hindered his throat this time, and he screamed his pain to the woods and the long, dark night, as his limbs lengthened and his bones broke and formed anew, and his muscles stretched before settling into their new place, as his body learned the way the change would take him. But it passed as suddenly as it had begun, and then three wolves stood in the moonlit clearing.

In wolf-form, his senses were even clearer, and he knew who stood on the path as if he walked alongside them. A wolf-smile stretched his slavering jaws wide. He stretched his new legs and ran, the others flanking him invisible as they snaked through the trees.

Three youths of the village trudged along the forest-path, heavy from the shared secret they carried and a long night of fruitless searching, after the priest spoke to the butcher, and the butcher spoke to the priest, and both came to horrifying conclusion that no one had seen the boy since noontime. Nowhere in the village, and nowhere in the surrounding fields, all of the village men had spread out in the forest to search. Tired as they were, these three wished they had hidden him nearer and failing that, wished some sign of him had been found where they’d left him, and they called his name half-heartedly, expecting no answer.

Around a bend in the path, their lantern-light fell on a sudden figure, and they shouted in surprise at the unexpected sight of it, at its pale, blood-streaked flesh. It was only the blind boy, one thought, and so his fright left him—why, the fool had even somehow lost his clothes. Another was smarter, and cast his eyes about, and could not shake the feeling that he was being watched. The last remembered better the stories about the woods, about naked men on the path and the wolves that wore their fur outside-in.

“So, you have come back for me,” the boy said, but his voice sounded strange and confident like they’d never heard it, in a way that gave even the stupidest of the three pause. “Well?” he asked, when they were silent. “Not even an apology?”

Hesitantly, the last youth stepped forward and began to offer one, but then the sounds came of things moving in the woods about them, of a low, menacing growl. The last thing they heard was the boy’s laugh. He moved so fast that they never saw him, and the lantern went out, plunging them into the darkness beneath the branches of the trees.

The law of the wood is the law of the hunt. By the time the rest of the men turned the same bend of the path, the youths’ blood and entrails spread before them like the work of a mad painter. One of their fathers saw his son’s face, just his face, detached from the rest of his body, and he screamed and fell down dead on the spot. Then they saw the creature as their eyes adjusted to the dark and the shock, just past the ring of lantern-light, crouched and eating.

All of the village men had gone out to look for the boy at the priest’s insistence, meaning _all of the village men,_ and when one pushed to the front of the crowd, the boy dropped his meal and stepped into the lantern-light to greet him, half-changed and smeared in gore from his mouth to his navel. His face was just human enough to recognize, his throat just human enough for speech.

“My child,” the old priest said. “What have you done?”

“They brought me to the woods. I obeyed its law,” the boy said.

Tears smarted in the priest’s eyes. “My boy, my boy,” he cried, for he had, truly, loved the boy like a son, “Don’t you know that you have condemned yourself to hell?”

“The night grows cold, father,” the boy said, but he was a boy no longer. “And I have only the fires of hell to warm me.”

From the dark woods all around, a howling rose, sounding like a dozen wolves, a hundred, singing their mournful song in an unholy chorus. There is something sad about the wolf’s howl, as if the world has left no place for them, so they must sing only to each other, and to the cold moon and stars above. As a man, those of the village turned and fled with the wolves chasing them.

One tripped on a root and fell, and the boy-turned-wolf was on him in an instant, knowing the smell on him of his warm kitchen, of blood and fresh meat. The wolf licked up his neck and face, and, in a voice inhuman, spoke in the butcher’s ear. “Run, my friend,” he said. “Run home to your pretty wife while my mark is on you, and you need not fear the wolves.”

Heeding his words, the butcher fled, though he did so crying for his loss.

For many years and many miles, the village mothers gathered their children close on cold, winter nights and told tales of the red wolf that they called the Devil, accompanied always by two great wolves as black as midnight that followed him as a closely as a witch’s familiars.

The red wolf left the path, for it lay empty, and there was nothing for him there, and into the woods where waited the she-wolf and the one that had been the hunter. They licked his face clean of blood and viscera like the bride and bridegroom feed each other at their reception, and the pack looked on like the wedding guests. As if by invisible signal, the she-wolf nipped at the red wolf’s ear and ran off, and the wolf that had been the hunter followed, and the pack like one body ran after.

A howl broke free of the red wolf’s throat, and he gave chase through the trees with the pack all around. He ran as a wolf, and he ran in the woods, and he ran without fear.

***

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings, now we're cooking with spoilers:  
> -Matt gets the werewolf bite during sex
> 
> The part where I subject you, my captive audience, to brain yelling:  
> -Listen. This lends itself so well to a fratt AU that I couldn't NOT write it. RED.  
> -Me @ myself: Why don't u write something shorter by basing a fic on this 5-page short story and maybe you'll calm down.  
> -Also me, 8k words in: What if I spent 1000 words here talking about werewolf politics  
> -If you have a crush on the same person, just unionize!


End file.
